within another circle of categories. Let the rash reasoner who madly tries conclusions on a matter of such infinite pith and moment, with data so inapt and poor, pause in sacred horror before, having first "Put out the light, he then puts out THE LIGHT!"
There are peculiarities in the soul removing it out of the range of physical combinations and making a distinct destiny fairly predicable of it. When we reflect on the nature of a self contained will, intelligent of immaterial verities and perhaps transcendent of space and time, how burlesque is the terror of the ancient corpuscular theorists lest the feebly cohering soul, on leaving the body, especially if death happened during a storm, would be blown in pieces all abroad! Socrates, in the Phado, has a hearty laugh over this; but Lucretius seriously urges it.15 The answer to the skeptical reasoning from analogy is double. First, the lines of partial correspondence which visibly terminate within our tangible reach can teach nothing as to the termination of other lines which lead out of sight and disappear in a spiritual region. An organized material form for instance, a tree is fatally limited: else it would finally fill and exhaust the earth. But no such limiting necessity can be predicated of mind. Secondly, as far as there is genuine analogy, its implications are much stronger in favor of immortality than against it. Matter, whose essence is materiality, survives all apprehensible changes; spirit, whose essence is spirituality, should do the same.
Another attack on the doctrine of a future life is masked in the negative Argument from Ignorance. We do not know how we shall live again; we are unable to construct the conditions and explain the details of a spiritual state of existence; and therefore, it is said, we should of right conclude that there is no such thing. The proposition is not usually stated so blankly; but it really amounts to that. The Epicureans say, as a tree cannot exist in the sky, nor clouds in the ocean, nor fishes in the meadow, nor water in stone, thus the mind cannot exist apart from the nerves and the blood. This style of reasoning is a bold begging of the question. Our present experience is vacant of any specific knowledge of the conditions, methods, and contents of a life it has not yet experienced: therefore there is no such life. Innumerable millions of facts beyond our present knowledge unquestionably exist. It is not in any way difficult to conceive that innumerable millions of experiences and problems now defying and eluding our utmost powers may hereafter fall within our comprehension and be easily solved. Will you accept the horizon of your mind as the limit of the universe? In the present, experience must be confined within its own boundaries by the necessity of the case. If an embryo were endowed with a developed reasoning consciousness, it could not construct any intelligible theory of the world and life into which it was destined soon to emerge. But it would surely be bad logic to infer, because the embryo could not, from want of materials within its experience, ascertain the how, the when, the where, and the what, of the life awaiting it, that there was no other life reserved for it. An acorn buried and sprouting in the dark mould, if endowed with intelligent consciousness, could not know any definite particulars of its maturer life yet to be in the upper light and air, with cattle in its shade and
15 Lib. iii. ll. 503-508.
singing birds in its branches. Ignorance is not a ground of argument, only of modest suspense. We can only reason from what we know. And the wondrous mysteries or natural miracles with which science abounds, myriads of truths transcending all fictions, melt and remove from the path of faith every supposed difficulty. Any quantity of facts have been scientifically established as real which are intrinsically far more strange and baffling to belief than the assertion of our immortality is. Indeed, "there is no more mystery in the mind living forever in the future than in its having been kept out of life through a past eternity. The authentic wonder is the fact of the transition having been made from the one to the other; and it is far more incredible that, from not having been, we are, than that, from actual being, we shall continue to be." 16
The unbounded possibilities of life suggested by science and open to imagination furnish sufficient reply to the objection that we cannot conceive the precise causes and modes of a future state. Had one little partitular been different in the structure of the eye, or in the radiation and media of light, we should never have seen the stars! We should have supposed this globe the whole of creation. So some slightest integument or hindering condition may now be hiding from us the sublime reality and arrangements of immortality which in death's disenveloping hour are to burst into our vision as the stellar hemisphere through the night. Shut up now to one form of being and one method of experience, how can we expect an exhaustive knowledge of other and future forms and methods of being and experience? It is a contradiction to ask it. But the soul is warranted in having faith, like a buried mustard seed which shall yet mount into its future life. A sevenfold denser mystery and a seven times narrower ignorance would bring no real argument against the survival of the soul. For in an omnipotent infinitude of possibilities one line of ignorance cannot exhaust the avenues and capacities of being. Escaping the flesh, we may soar into heaven
"Upon ethereal wings, whose way
Lies through an element so fraught
With living Mind that, as they play,
Their every movement is a thought."
Ignorance of the scientific method avails nothing against moral proofs of the fact. The physiologist studying the coats of the stomach, the anatomist dissecting the convolutions of the brain, could never tell that man is capable of sentiment, faith, and logic. No stethoscope can discern the sound of an expectation, and no scalpel can lay bare a dream; yet there are expectations and dreams. No metaphysical glass can detect, no prognosis foresee, the death of the soul with the dissolution of its organs: on empirical grounds, the assertion of it is therefore unwarranted. But though no amount of obscurity enveloping the subject, no extent of ignorance disabling us now to grasp the secret, is a legitimate basis of disbelief, yet actually, there can be no doubt, in multitudes of instances, the effectual cause of disbelief in immortality is the impossibility of vividly conceiving its conditions and scenery; "for," as one of the subtlest of thinkers has remarked, "however far faith may go beyond experience, it
16 Martineau, Sermon on Immortality, in Endeavors after the Christian Life.
must always be chained down by it at a distance." But if there are good grounds for anticipating another life, then man should confide in it, no matter how incompetent he is to construct its theatre and foresee its career. A hundred years ago, one might have scouted the statement that the most fearful surgical operations would be performed without inflicting pain, because it was impossible to see how it could be done. Or if a person had been informed that two men, one in Europe and one in America, should converse in lightning athwart the bed of the Atlantic, he might have rejected it as an absurdity, because he could not conceive the mode. If destined to a future life, all we could reasonably expect to know of it now would be through hinting germs and mystic presentiments of it. And there we do experience to the fullest extent: their ceaseless prophecies are everywhere with us,